Flying back to America in tears, she told herself, “I’m going to give this about a year and if it doesn’t happen, I’m going to come back.” But it did work out and, starting in 1979, Laura was making cheese daily. One day Helen Allen, co-owner of the Wine and Cheese Center near San Francisco’s Jackson Square, introduced her to Alice Waters. “I thought, ‘A restaurant? What’s a restaurant going to want with cheese?’” But that encounter changed her life. After she started selling to Chez Panisse, cheese shops and chefs from all over California started ordering her products. In 1981, while I was the chef at Chez Panisse Café, we would send someone to the bus station every day to pick up a drippingwet box of fresh goat cheese for our signature salad. Soon Wolfgang Puck was using Laura Chenel’s chèvre on his pizza. Square One wrapped it in phyllo and baked it to serve with a pear, endive, and walnut salad. Others bundled it in grape leaves and grilled it. The impact of Laura Chenel’s cheese was felt as far away as New York, where chef Larry Forgione at the restaurant An American Place incorporated it into a strawberry cheesecake. The ubiquitous goat cheese became a symbol of California cuisine.
Laura would visit restaurants to train the staff how to use and store goat cheese, giving them samples of a range of cheeses, from mild and young to sharp and aged. In 1983, when she went to Cindy Pawlcyn’s Mustards Grill to show the staff her cheeses, she brought a newborn goat with her to win them over.
Laura inspired others to try their hand at cheese making, especially women. “I think that aspect was critical,” she remarked. “Cheese had been a very traditional male-dominated [business].” She paved the way for Mary Keehn at Cypress Grove, SoYoung Scanlon at Andante, Cindy and Liam Callahan at Bellwether Farms, and Jennifer Lynn Bice at Redwood Hill Farm.
In 2006, after thirty years of making cheese, Laura sold her company to a French business. “I knew the man’s father when I’d been to France, so I respected the company. I didn’t have it for sale, they just called. It was time. I was tired.” She said that the transition was gradual. “I ended up spending almost four years side by side with them making cheese and tending my goats. The goats just this spring [2010] went to their new home, built from scratch for them. So they’re happy and I’m now going, ‘Okay, who am I? What am I going to do?’”
While respect for custom and convention helped Europeans preserve their culinary practices, it also made them less open to the food of other cultures. Californians, on the other hand, embraced multicultural cooking. According to Harvey Steiman, editor-at-large of Wine Spectator magazine, home cooks had begun to explore “diverse cooking perspectives” as early as the mid-twentieth century. “Pick up any issue of Sunset magazine from the 1950s and you will find Mexican, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and other cultures represented not just by their own dishes but by new dishes that incorporate ingredients and techniques from those cultures.” However, it wasn’t until California chefs picked up these cultural threads and started to weave them together that California cuisine was born.
It took time for this diversity to be fully accepted. Food writer Janet Fletcher observed that for some white California residents in the 1940s through the 1960s, this was “the food of the other, whether it was Southeast Asian or Indian or Mexican or Japanese. Eventually California became so multiethnic, so diverse—you lived next to people from other countries, you worked with them—that there was no longer that sense of the other, and this became our food too.” Instead of an awkward intrusion into the cultural status quo, California’s multicultural diversity became an enrichment that contributed to the development of its cuisine. Some chefs, such as Barbara Tropp at China Moon, focused on foods from a specific culture, faithfully honoring those recipe traditions. Others, like Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger at City Restaurant in Los Angeles, served traditional dishes from many cultures on one eclectic menu. Still others, like Roy Yamaguchi at 385 North in West Hollywood, experimented with fusion cooking.
California cuisine was further distinguished by an emphasis on techniques and equipment that were not part of the European-style restaurant kitchen, such as live-fire cooking on a grill or in a wood-burning oven. Chef Tony Gulisano, who did a stint behind the grill at Prego in Los Angeles, asserted that “the whole start of the California food movement was that wood grill.” At Prego, “the grill was full for hours straight. That was the distinct component that differentiated it from the past. It was attractive to the general public as well—smelled good.” The open kitchen, another signature of California cuisine, permitted customers to watch chefs at work, a dynamic that changed a restaurant’s atmosphere, style of service, and dining experience.
Only in California
I’m not sure it could have happened anywhere else on the planet. You needed this amazing confluence of circumstance—this collection of people, the land, the climate.
—Chef Judy Rodgers, Zuni Café
The conditions that led to the growth of California cuisine were the result of happenstance and a gathering of talented, well-traveled, and intelligent people who were in the right place at the right time. But these people needed raw materials, and California, the nation’s largest food-producing state, had them in abundance. California agriculture encompasses not only fruits and vegetables but dairy, livestock, and poultry. Dry in the south, wet in the north, cool on the coast, and warm in the inland valleys, the state’s microclimates give chefs year-round access to fresh produce. Variations in weather and soil permit California farmers to grow or raise almost anything imaginable, from cool-climate greens to tropical fruits: avocados and heirloom vegetables in San Diego County; lettuce, artichokes, and strawberries in Monterey County; rice in Sutter County; grapes in counties up and down the coast and in the Central Valley; pears, asparagus, and corn in the Sacramento Delta; dates in the desert. The San Joaquin Valley offers the greatest fecundity and diversity, producing dairy products and beef, as well as nuts, citrus, stone fruit, and melons.
This plenitude had a seductive pull on chefs. Chef Corey Lee came to cook at the French Laundry in the Napa Valley, planning to return later to his native New York to open his own restaurant. But after four and a half years as sous chef and then chef de cuisine, Corey told Thomas Keller, “I don’t think I’m going to go back to New York.” “He had become so accustomed to the quality of the vegetables in California,” said Thomas, “that he couldn’t see himself being as successful outside of the state. That is significant, when somebody who has all his life wanted to open a restaurant in New York realizes that he will be happier here because of the products. There’s no place I’ve been in our country that has the raw products that we have here in California, and we’re blessed.”
But the entrepreneurial climate of California may have been as important in the genesis of California cuisine as the accommodating weather. Cookbook author and former Cocolat owner Alice Medrich, who grew up in Los Angeles, thought historian Kevin Starr, in his book Coast of Dreams, captured the state’s spirit. “Basically he says that California is to the rest of the country, and especially the eastern establishment, as the New World was to Europeans. People who didn’t have prospects, or who had a sense of adventure, came here with all these dreams, and so this is the birthplace of all the crazy ideas that have now become very mainstream.”
Californians chose not to emulate the static, orderly societies of the East Coast and Europe. In the relatively young and developing region they felt at liberty to pursue their ambitions, and by virtue of their enterprise the economy began outperforming that of the rest of the nation. This attracted more innovators, who came to share in the opportunities and bring their visions to life. Creative Californians developed such whimsical commodities as fortune cookies, Popsicles, Barbie dolls, blue jeans, boysenberries, and white